Rich Roll & Ryan Holiday on The Odyssey’s Biggest Moral Questions

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Look, what I love is when ancient ideas sort of break containment and come back into the modern world. I don't mean like retrograde, bad, antiquated, anachronistic things. I mean when elements of what they would call the great conversation, that's what philosophy is, that's what ancient literature is sometimes referred to, ceases to be this thing that they used to do. And it comes through not just to people like me or you that are listening to this podcast, but like mass culture. That's what I think is so awesome about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

0:55Ryan Holiday: Whether you like the movie or not, the fact that you have an opinion about the movie, that the Odyssey is being talked about right now, is fantastic. It's how it was supposed to be. We don't talk enough about these ancient myths and stories, which are supposed to be living, evolving things, right? Every generation rediscovers, reinterprets, adds new takes and understanding of these ancient ideas. Which is, by the way, what they were in the ancient world. You think about, by the time Marks Reelus comes along, the Odyssey is much older to him than Shakespeare is to us, right? It's almost as ancient to him as he is to us.

1:38Ryan Holiday: So these ideas were always old. They were always being discovered and reinterpreted and re-talked about. Virgil's The Aeneid is a response in many ways to the Odyssey, but set from the perspective of the Romans. So I love this. I saw the movie. I thought it was great. Last year when I was in Greece, we went to Ithaca and I shot some stuff there. You might have seen that on social media. It was funny to record stuff a year ago and then just to sort of watch it blow up. That was cool. I guess it's a reminder that timing is everything. The content, you could say, had its own little odyssey, mostly sitting on a hard drive.

2:16Ryan Holiday: But the point is, I've been talking about the odyssey a lot. So I was really excited when my friend Rich Roll sent me a text. He and I were going back and forth about the movie. And he's like, let's hop on a podcast and let's just talk about it. And we did, which, by the way, I would have done, Rich, if you're listening, even if we weren't recording, because that's what I'm saying. That's what I love to talk about. And I love to kick around. That's what great art does, right? It brings people together. Even when they have divergent views, it's bringing them together to talk about that thing. So this is a chunk of that conversation that Rich and I had.

2:45Ryan Holiday: If you don't listen to the Rich Roll podcast, you should. I've been on it a bunch of times. It's one of my favorite podcasts. Rich is a super thoughtful guy. He doesn't usually do these remote. He does it in his amazing studio there in Southern California, which I've been out to many times. You can check out those episodes or his really high produced podcast with awesome people, some of the best athletes in the world, some of the best artists in the world. He even had Bruce Dickinson, lead singer of Iron Maiden, on. Was it last year? 18 months ago. Anyways, one of my favorite podcasts. We carry his book, Finding Ultra, in the bookstore.

3:20Ryan Holiday: He's been on the podcast. His dad, David Roll, has been on the podcast. He wrote a great book about Marshall, a great book about Truman. If you want some more Odyssey conversations, stay tuned. Listen to this. And then follow at Rich Roll everywhere. Listen to the Rich Roll podcast. And we'll get into it. Most leaders have a clear picture of how work is supposed to get done, but they have almost no visibility into how it's actually happening day to day. And without that visibility, you're just making decisions like what to automate or where AI is going to be helpful based on not much more than your gut or, you know, how you've always done things.

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6:27I love the movie. Saw it a second time last night. And you have been posting lots of videos and this YouTube video with your thoughts on what we should understand from the Odyssey, what's important to understand. And so I thought it was an opportune moment to just get you on here and have you share your reflections on Homer's Odyssey, Nolan's Odyssey, and how you're kind of synthesizing this and interpreting it for us. So first of all, I guess, like, how did you know, how did you like the movie?

7:03Ryan Holiday: Well, I should stipulate here that I know it not as a classicist. I don't speak Greek or Latin. I know it as a regular person who has been fascinated with it, who studied it with its connection to sort of stoic and other sort of forms of philosophy. And then my nine-year-old son got very excited about it. And so I've sort of hit it from a bunch of different angles, but all of these angles much closer to a lay person than say like a translator's, right? So I do feel like I was able to enjoy the movie on a couple of different levels. And I really did enjoy the movie. I thought it was spectacular.

7:43Ryan Holiday: I have some quibbles here or there. But I think what we have to understand is the Odyssey, like all of the other Greek myths, was both a form of art. It's beautiful language. It's evocative. It's entertaining. It's all this. But then it was there in a way that we don't always understand art and entertainment to be today, which was a means of communicating ancient wisdom and timeless moral truths. So, you know, like if you watch a Greek play, you know, like Shakespeare, all the actors are men, but they're not really like they wear these masks. The acting is not the key in a Greek play or in a Greek tragedy.

8:24Ryan Holiday: It's the language. It's the it's the lessons. It's the lines. And so I think the problem is we don't always understand art as being that like, you know, most fiction today is almost like I want to say it's almost amoral. and that it's like designed not to teach moral truths, but to question moral truths. And so if we understand the Odyssey as being this sort of story that was told and retold and retold for thousands of years, each generation sort of thinking about the same truths, but bringing their own interpretation and understanding of them, their understanding of Odysseus, for instance, the understanding of Odysseus' dilemmas throughout the play, then you should actually appreciate both what Nolan did in telling it his own way, and you should appreciate the arguments over it, right?

9:17Ryan Holiday: Like that is the point is that each generation reads the Odyssey differently than the generation before. And then each new medium that we're able to tell it in, including going from an oral tradition to a written tradition is going to fundamentally changed. The medium is the message. So each generation in telling and retelling it and how it captures it, whether it's with film or radio or a television miniseries versus a blockbuster, all of this is changing the story and allowing us to see it in a different way, which is the whole point. Yeah. The assignment is the interpretation. There is no one singular odyssey.

9:57There is this, you know, original text, I suppose. We're not even sure that Homer was one person. Every interpretation or translation is different, and it kind of evokes the lens of the translator. And right now we have Emily Wilson. Her translation is apparently a primary influence on Nolan's version, his interpretation in this movie. It's been interesting to see the discourse around her kind of like review of the movie, like her celebrating the fact that this is a monoculture moment and it's kind of exciting in that regard, while also her taking issue with how he has interpreted it. But I think that that is, you know, part of what is exciting about this.

10:43It is the clashing of these interpretations and how different people see it differently. Like, who is this character, Odysseus, and what, you know, what is it about him and this story that is so indelible that has made it the architecture for all stories and a tale that has withstood, you know, eons of time and is still relevant today?

11:06Ryan Holiday: That's the debate that we should celebrate. And that's what the conversation is about. And I think that's very different than, you know, hey, should Helen be black or not? Is it OK to have a trans person in Iran, like which which which is one of the points that I want to make. And I think Emily Wilson would appreciate, given that she wrote she wrote a famous biography of Seneca earlier in her academic career. But Seneca, 2000 years ago, in one of his letters is lamenting just people totally missing the point of the Odyssey. And I think it's it's fascinating to think that 2000 years ago, people were having these debates about where was Troy and, you know, where were the different islands and like, did it actually happen or not?

11:52Ryan Holiday: Just like today, we're like, is Homer really one person? Was he blind or not? And he was saying that this is not what it's about. Like, we're not supposed to be debating the trivia of the art, but we should be going to the essential questions of the art and that ultimately we should understand that Odysseus in his odyssey is a reflection of the human undergoing any kind of ordeal, battling their sort of higher self and lower self, you know, the perils of hubris, the impossibility of ever returning home. You know, he's saying like, if you don't see the, if what you're debating about the odyssey is not the philosophical questions, then you're just engaging in culture war nonsense.

12:39Ryan Holiday: Obviously, he wouldn't have used that term. And I think it's sad that it's devolved into sort of culture war nonsense. But if that's what you're fighting about, then you're part of the problem, right? Like, I think there's like a lot of things to argue about in the Odyssey. And there's a bunch of issues I take with, I would argue over interpretations and arguments that Nolan's Odysseus and Odyssey are making and how they, not like because, oh, you have to be true to the text, but this choice versus that choice, you know, fundamentally changes the arc of the story. I'll give you a really good example.

13:16Ryan Holiday: So like the whole, and are we cool with spoilers? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Okay, the catch should be out of the bag by now, 3000 years later. But I think the premise in Nolan's Odyssey is that this sort of law of hospitality, how we treat strangers, how we treat others, and we violate this at our peril. And so the tale of Polyphemus, the interaction with the Cyclops is so fascinating because in my, again, my children love this story, you know, Odysseus in the poem, you know, he introduces himself as that his name is no man. He tells Polyphemus that his name is no man. So then when they blind Polyphemus and he's screaming to the other Cyclopses, which also don't exist in the movie, they say, who hurt you?

14:05Ryan Holiday: And he says, no one has hurt me or no man has hurt me. And they say, OK, well, if no one has hurt you, shut up. This isn't a problem. And then he goes away. And then Odysseus, having escaped, shouts out at him. Hey, actually, it wasn't no one that hurt you. It was me, Odysseus, sacker of cities that did it. and you'll know my fame. And so it's this moment of hubris and ego where Odysseus needs credit for what he inflicted on Polyphemus that sets in motion the central conflict of the book, which is he's cursed by the gods. So that's missing. And I think people will recognize that. But to me, the critical choice that Nolan makes is that they walk into the cave, they start to sense something is amiss, and then the Cyclops walks in and then begins eating them.

14:54Ryan Holiday: So the Cyclops is indisputably the monstrous villain of the encounter. But in the poem and in the most retellings, Odysseus and the men walk into the cave, see that it's full of sheep, slaughter the sheep and eat them. And then Polyphemus comes in and is enraged that someone has killed his sheep. And so it's actually Odysseus first who violates the law or oversteps. And Polyphemus is, although monstrous and eats humans, somewhat righteous in his anger. And then Odysseus is cunning in his craftiness for getting out and then egotistical in claiming credit and then bringing the wrath of gods upon him.

15:43Ryan Holiday: So it's like, obviously, you have to simplify it in the movie. But I do think this is an essential simplification because, first off, it makes it simple. And the whole point is that the Odyssey is complicated and it's hard to know who the good guy is. But also the idea that Odysseus just shoots Polyphemus with an arrow when he escapes and this is what makes the gods angry is really not what is the driving force of the Odyssey going forward. It strikes me as a glaring omission if you're trying to underscore the hubris of Odysseus. But the way that I make sense of that begins with the chyron at the very beginning of the movie where it says this is a time of apparent magic.

16:29And I think the word apparent is important. I think what it's telegraphing is that this is a story of unreliable narrators. And the way that Nolan plays with time and narrative is through the this the whole movie is anchored in a recounting of what happened through the perspective of a couple different people. It's Odysseus telling the story to Calypso when he's on the island with her. And it's Menelaus sharing what he remembers from the Trojan War to Telemachus. And so we have to question whether these recollections or the way that these stories are being told are actually what happened or a version of what happened that suits the internal narrative of the narrator.

17:18And I think when you think of the way that Odysseus is recollecting what happened and, you know, his version of what went down with the Cyclops, maybe he conveniently decided to omit that part because it confronts him with his own guilt. And his guilt and his trauma and this PTSD that he's suffering seems to be what Nolan is most interested in. And he's interested in it because this is his portal into wedding this ancient story with what he with his perspective on what's happening right now in modern society. And for me, that's what makes this version, his interpretation, so resonant because it seems so current with what we're seeing around us at the moment.

18:08And this is something that you talk about a lot through the lens of Stoic philosophy, this degradation of kind of our moral center at the moment, where if you look at what's happening in the House of Ithaca, you know, there's sycophants and people behaving badly, acting on their own self-interest in a very craven way. And is this not simply a metaphor for the White House at the moment? It's like a hostile takeover. Yeah, it seems to be like where where Nolan's interest is and why, you know, he felt urgently about telling this story now.

18:45Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's about a collapse of the old ways. And I think he does a really good job, maybe a better job than I would have anticipated or even considered, of showing the collapse of the old ways all the way around. back to even, you know, interpreting the Trojan horse as some sort of, you know, violation of the laws of war and trickery. Although it even goes back, you know, even further, there's a sort of predecessor story to the Odyssey of why they get sucked in to this law of war. There's this, you know, sort of party of the gods and they all make this pact about who's the most beautiful one. And it's a long story, but basically like Odysseus doesn't want to go fight in the Trojan War.

19:31Ryan Holiday: That's not something you see in this movie or in the Odyssey exactly. But Odysseus doesn't want to fight in the Trojan War. He tries to get out of it. And he actually claims that he's crazy at first. and he claims that he's crazy and only by the test that they prove that he's not crazy. He's like plowing his field and they lay Telemachus down in front of him plowing his field. And when he stops to not run over his own son, that's how they realize that he's not actually crazy. And so the whole idea of this being this sort of insane war that shouldn't have happened in the first place, that he's sort of sucked into and fights in reluctantly because of this kind of pact that he'd made many years before.

20:19Ryan Holiday: I think what's so lovely about Greek mythology and about philosophy is that kind of the more you know about it, the more it operates on all these other levels. This would be a modern analogy, but it's like you can't watch Arrested Development one time. You've got to watch it like 30 times. And then you understand that it's operating on all these different levels and there are these callbacks. And so not only is the Odyssey something you should read and watch and read and watch again, but you should read multiple translations and then you have to read the other myths and then you have to read the poetry about it and the stories about it and the interpretations of it.

20:57Ryan Holiday: What you start to get each time is just a slightly different understanding of it. And from that, you're able to consider these questions from all these different angles. Each author has a different take on Odysseus, has a different take on Helen, has a different take on Polyphemus, as we're talking about, has a different take on Telemachus. Is Odysseus a hero or is he a villain? Is he both? Is Agamemnon a hero or a villain? is helen a hero or a villain um you know was she kidnapped or did she fall in love you know um uh or there's another version of it where she's like transported to egypt there's all these different versions of it and so if we understand it more as like source material that people are riffing on over and over and over again almost like a song sample i think we understand a little bit more of what they're trying to do.

21:57Ryan Holiday: And then the idea is each one of these reads helps correspond to something ultimately in your own life. This isn't just like debating what style of painting is best, but this is like, okay, but what kind of person should I be? And what you find is that ultimately all these things come down to some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy and in life. Like the trolley problem is really interesting in philosophy, right? This idea of if you do nothing, the trolley runs over, was it five people? But if you pull this lever, it runs over one person, right? That's the trolley problem. But this is actually the choice that Odysseus has to make between Scylla and Charybdis.

22:42Ryan Holiday: Although I always thought it was Charbidus because I never heard it out loud. Yeah, no, I'm pretty sure it's Charybdis. It is. But like he and he doesn't fully weigh it that much in the movie, but like between a rock and a hard place or sometimes you'll hear people say Scylla and Charybdis as just meaning like a dilemma, like just a hard choice. But it's so much more than that. It's Odysseus has to choose between letting six of his men be destroyed for sure. or do they all go down in the whirlpool? And it's actually really interesting because in the movie, Nolan kind of has him trick the men into choosing for him.

23:26Ryan Holiday: Like he kind of abdicates the moral choice. But as the band Rush would say, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. This is still, he's still the moral choice. So anyways, I just think it's so fascinating that you have this poem from 3000 years ago So accidentally chancing upon, or not accidentally, but chancing on this moral question that philosophers are still debating to this day.